Monoprix successfully digitizes its receipts with MongoDB

Monoprix, an umbrella of several brands, has been transforming urban retail for over 90 years. The company aims to satisfy customers’ every need—be it textile, home, leisure, beauty, or food—at any time of day. Its 22,000 employees operate a robust network of more than 842 stores in city centers, serving more than 3 million customers daily and making 3.1 million annual deliveries. The group includes the Monoprix, Monop’, Monop’daily, Monop’beauty, Monop’station, Monoprix Maison, and Naturalia brands, as well as its online shopping site, Monoprix.fr, and the logistics subsidiary SAMADA.

Monoprix handles 700,000 to 1 million transactions per day, with an average yearly revenue of €5 billion. However, due to a 2023 regulatory requirement, Monoprix was required to issue digital receipts for all transactions, only issuing paper receipts upon customer request, resulting in the need for significant IT system developments.

An early start

In 2021 Monoprix began designing its initial solution for digitizing receipts based on information provided by the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), an international organization dedicated to reducing technology costs in the retail sector.

The following year, the company launched Ticket Online, based on MongoDB Atlas, giving users smartphone access to digitized receipts. The company provided an additional improvement: an application called Markdown Rates, which enables the company to calculate its actual revenue in relation to in-store promotions as well as facilitate the verification of shopping carts or baskets at store exits by security guards.

“But we must go further and open the scope to all transactions,” said Emmanuel Lecomte, Information Systems Architect at Monoprix.

The information journey

Any Monoprix store must add various types of information to the electronic receipt database, including actions such as the opening or closing of a cash drawer or coupons used or received. To facilitate this, the IT team launched an evolution of Ticket Online, now called Transaction Online (TOL), in 2024. TOL uses a single data model adopted by all systems, as well as a set of services for integrating and viewing data and transactions and an exchange bus for transporting and routing transactions—all hosted on MongoDB Atlas to ensure data persistence.

As an example of the solution in use, when information arrives from store checkouts, mobile applications, and e-commerce websites, TOL processes it for tasks such as order management, communications, promotions, or coupons. From there, TOL routes the data to various target systems: to customers for electronic receipts, to Monoprix’s customer service department for handling complaints and inquiries, to the sales promotion department for promotion records, or to the business intelligence department for real-time analysis of transactions and receipts.

The best-suited solution

TOL tackles multiple challenges, including the need for easy processing of various types of documents and the need to email each customer their receipt before they leave the store. In addition, the company requires an optimized view of in-store inventory with real-time sales feedback to keep the group’s logistics subsidiary, SAMADA, better informed.

“The receipt is a complex object that includes metadata,” explains Lecomte. “And it’s not easy to model in a traditional, or relational, database system.” For Monoprix, MongoDB was the best-suited solution. Based on a document-oriented model, MongoDB makes implementation easier and more flexible, enabling the integration of internally developed API microservices.

The MongoDB professional services team was a powerful bonus on this journey: Monoprix needed to implement the project relatively quickly but lacked all the necessary in-house skills. MongoDB worked with Monoprix’s IT team to validate the choice of solution, support its implementation, and confirm the correct sizing of clusters in the cloud, enabling the IT team to focus on core business activities.

Other projects based on MongoDB are already underway at Monoprix. They include the implementation of an event store to log every change and interaction related to customer data. Additionally, Lecome adds, “Soon we will be migrating our on-premises databases to MongoDB Atlas.”

5,000 transactions per minute

During peak consumption periods, such as lunchtime or the end of the working day, Monoprix manages up to 5,000 transactions per minute and can issue 100 electronic receipts per second within the MongoDB Atlas environment.

The company’s successful technological evolution means that Monoprix now has accurate, real-time data in a scalable architecture.

Today, Monoprix is using AI to build models for improved revenue forecasts of its future franchises, and it is actively planning for the integration of AI into its TOL solution.

To learn more, visit MongoDB Atlas.